Have you ever wondered where swimming started? How did it begin? Can we humans be considered “natural swimmers” taking to the water like ducks? And why did an activity that was most likely learned for survival, morph into a sport with many different styles on many different continents and then develop into today’s competitive swimming? How have coaches’ training methods improved to seek faster times and how has training equipment evolved with this dynamic sport? It’s an on-going process with competitions controlled by governing bodies like FINA in order to create fair international competition. In All About Swimmin’ discover the evolution of stokes and training as well as pick up some useful current-day information about swimming in college, USA Year-Round Competitive Swimming programs and Learn to Swim resources.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF SWIMMING…
Earliest History
Swimming is a centuries old activity. The earliest physical evidence of swimming relates to prehistoric drawings from the Stone Age at “the cave of swimmers” near Wadi Sura in the south western part of Egypt. Documentary evidence provides references from circa 2000 B.C. with several examples from the Greek fables and from the Bible (Ezekiel 47:5, Acts 27:42) and Isaiah 25:11, who asserts that “he that swimmeth spreadeth forth his hands to swim”.
Ancient Swimmers
An early form of front crawl can be seen in an Eygptian artifact dated between 4000 and 9000 BC. and images found in Greece dated more than 2,000 years ago, show swimmers and divers enjoying aquatic activities. Other artifacts depict swimmers from the Babylonian, Inca and Indian empires and perhaps the first man-made swimming pools in India. On the other side of the world, people native to North America and to tropical islands such as Tahiti were also in the water developing their own strokes and styles.
